An industry in transition: Entry and exit in daily newspaper markets, 1987-2003

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 83, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 381-396

  Cho, Hiromi ^a   Martin, Hugh J ^b   Lacy, Stephen ^c  

^a BUNKYO GAKUIN UNIVERSITY   (Japan)

^b UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA   (United States)

^c MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MARKET TRANSITION; MEDIA INDUSTRY;

EID: 33748644732     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900608300210     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Eric Zorn, "Eric Zorn's Notebook," , 6 April 2005, retrieved 11 February 2006, www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ericzorn/weblog/archives/ 2005/04/for_your_refere_6.html.
2. Frank Ahrens, "Hard News: Daily Papers Face Unprecedented Competition," Washington Post, 20 February 2005, sec. F, p. 1.
3. John Morton, "Keeping the Faith," American Journalism Review, February/March 2006, 68.
4. The Association for Suppliers of Printing, Publishing & Converting Technologies, "Newspaper Industry Trends and Implications for Suppliers," October 2004.
5. Evan Cornog, "Let's Blame the Readers," Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 2005, 43;
6. "Something to Discover: The American Newspaper at a Crossroads," Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2005;
7. Morton, "Keeping the Faith."
8. Newspaper Association of America, Facts About Newspapers 2004, Newspaper Association of America, 2004, retrieved 27 February 2006 from .
9. Total daily circulation was 60,357,563 in 1965 and 55,185,351 in 2003. Newspaper Association of America, Facts About Newspapers 2004.
10. The number of weeklies increased 2% from 6,580 in 1996 to 6,704 in 2003. Total weekly circulation increased 9% from 45,911,510 to 50,212,925. The number of Sunday papers increased 63% from 562 in 1965 to 917 in 2003. Sunday circulation increased 20% from 48,600,090 to 58,494,695 in the same period. Newspaper Association of America, Facts About Newspapers 2004.
11. Hugh J. Martin, "Some Effects from Horizontal Integration of Daily Newspapers on Markets, Prices and Competition" (paper presented at the annual meeting of AEJMC, Kansas City, MO, 2003), 17.
12. Colin Hoskins, Stuart McFadyen, and Adam Finn, Media Economics: Applying Economics to New and Traditional Media (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2004).
13. James N. Rosse, "Daily Newspapers, Monopolistic Competition, and Economies of Scale," The American Economic Review 57 (May 1967): 522-33.
14. William B. Blankenburg, "Newspaper Scale & Newspaper Expenditures," Newspaper Research Journal 10 (spring 1989): 100;
15. James N. Dertouzos and William B. Trautman, "Economic Effects of Media Concentration: Estimates from a Model of the Newspaper Firm," The Journal of Industrial Economics 39 (September 1990): 12;
16. James M. Ferguson, "Daily Newspaper Advertising Rates, Local Media Cross-Ownership, Newspaper Chains, and Media Competition," Journal of Law and Economics 26 (autumn 1983): 635-54;
17. Rosse, "Daily Newspapers, Monopolistic Competition," 645.
18. Stephen Lacy and Todd E Simon, The Economics and Regulation of United States Newspapers (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Pub., 1993): 94-101;
19. Michael O. Wirth, "Economic Barriers to Entering Media Industries in the United States," in Communication Yearbook, ed. Margaret L. McLaughlin (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1986), 423.
20. Wirth, "Economic Barriers to Entering Media."
21. Wirth, "Economic Barriers to Entering Media," 440.
22. Robert G. Picard, "Modeling the Problem: De Novo Entry into Daily Newspaper Markets," Newspaper Research Journal 18 (summer-fall 1987): 94-108.
23. Picard, "Modeling the Problem, 95.
24. Richard E. Caves, "Industrial Organization and New Findings on the Turnover and Mobility of Firms," Journal of Economic Literature 36 (December 1998): 1954.
25. Timothy Dunne, Mark J. Roberts, and Larry Samuelson, "Patterns of Firm Entry and Exit in U.S. Manufacturing Industries," RAND Journal of Economics 19 (winter 1988): 595-615.
26. Dunne, Roberts, and Samuelson, "Patterns of Firm Entry and Exit," 514.
27. Rajshee Agarwal and Michael Gort, "The Evolution of Markets and Entry, Exit and Survival of Firms," The Review of Economics and Statistics 78 (August 1996): 439-98.
28. Agarwal and Gort, "The Evolution of Markets and Entry," 490.
29. Lacy and Simon, The Economics and Regulation;
30. James N. Rosse, "The Decline of Direct Newspaper Competition," Journal of Communication 30 (summer 1980): 65-71;
31. James N. Rosse and James Dertouzos, "Economic Issues in Mass Communication Industries" (paper presented at the Proceedings of the Symposium on Media Concentration, 14-15 December 1978).
32. Rosse and Dertouzos, "Economic Issues in Mass Communication Industries."
33. Janet A. Bridges, Barry R. Litman, and Lamar W. Bridges, "Rosse's Model Revisited: Moving to Concentric Circles to Explain Newspaper Competition," Journal of Media Economics 15 (1, 2002): 10-11.
34. Bridges, Litman, and Bridges, "Rosse's Model," 15-16.
35. Robert G. Picard and Jeffrey H. Brody, "The Structure of the Newspaper Industry," in The Media and Entertainment Industries, ed. A. N. Greco (Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2000), 46-75.
36. R. S. Thompson, "Entry and Market Characteristics - a Logit Study of Newspaper Launching in the Republic of Ireland," Journal of Economic Studies 13 (2, 1986): 14-15.
37. Hugh J. Martin, "Characteristics of Entry and Exit in Weekly Newspaper Markets: An Exploratory Study" (paper presented at the annual meeting of AEJMC, Toronto, 2004).
38. Martin, "Characteristics of Entry."
39. Stephen Lacy, David C. Coulson, and Hugh J. Martin, "Ownership and Barriers to Entry in Non-Metropolitan Daily Newspaper Markets," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 81 (summer 2004): 327-42.
40. Picard, "Modeling the Problem," 97.
41. Teddi Dineley Johnson, "It Pays to Be Free," presstime, February 2006, retrieved 23 February 2006 at .
42. Johnson, "It Pays to Be Free."
43. Lacy and Simon, The Economics and Regulation, 24-25. It cannot be assumed that readers will consider all dailies in a county equivalent. Two counties with equal numbers of dailies would likely have different distributions of readers among them.
44. These measures have been used in previous studies. For examples see Stephen Lacy, "The Impact of Intercity Competition on Daily Newspaper Content," Journalism Quarterly 65 (summer 1988): 399-406;
45. Stephen Lacy and Lucinda Davenport, "Daily Newspaper Market Structure, Concentration, and Competition," Journal of Media Economics 7 (3, 1994): 33-46;
46. and Stephen Lacy and Alan Blanchard, "The Impact of Public Ownership, Profits, and Competition on Number of Newsroom Employees and Starting Salaries at Mid-Sized Daily Newspapers," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 80 (winter 2003): 949-68.
47. A study of metropolitan areas found a high correlation between the population of the area and the number of daily newspapers published in the metro area. See Paul R. Hagner, "Newspaper Competition: Isolating Related Market Characteristics," Journalism Quarterly 60 (summer 1983): 281-87.
48. Copies of Editor & Publisher International Year Book (New York: Editor & Publisher) were examined for the years 1988 through 2004. Each year presents the data from the previous year.
49. Copies of Circulation (Des Plaines, IL: Standard Rate & Data Service) were examined for the same period as the Year Books.
50. For a discussion of types of newspapers see Lacy and Simon, The Economics and Regulation, 112-18.
51. The term "weekly" applied to all newspapers that published fewer than five times a week.
52. Data were examined to see if they fit the assumptions of logistic regression. The data fit the assumptions.
53. Regression coefficients are the natural log values of the increase in odds that a case will be classified as having a characteristic (value equals 1) with a one-unit increase in the independent variable.
54. For more information about logistic regression see Barbara G. Tabachnick and Linda S. Fidell, Using Multivariate Statistics, 2d ed. (New York: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1996), 575-633.
55. See Lacy and Simon, The Economics and Regulation;
56. and Stephen Lacy and Hugh J. Martin, "Circulation and Advertising Competition: Implications of Research," Newspaper Research Journal 25 (winter 2004): 18-39.
57. Hugh J. Martin, "A Study of How a Strategy Creating Clusters of Commonly Owned Newspapers Affects Prices, Quality and Profits" (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 2001).
58. For an example of scholarship that assumes little or no competition see Gilbert Cranberg, Randall Bezanson, and John Soloski, Taking Stock: Journalism and the Publicly Traded Newspaper (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 2001).
59. For research about the existence and impact of competition, see Bridges, Litman, and Bridges, "Rosse's Model"
60. and Lacy and Martin, "Circulation and Advertising Competition.
61. Stephen Lacy, "Commitment of Financial Resources as a Measure of Quality," Measuring Media Content, Quality and Diversity: Approaches and Issues in Content Research, ed. Robert G. Picard (Turku, Finland: The Media Group, Business and Research Development Centre, Turku School of Economics and Business Administration, 2000), 25-50.
62. Richard Maisel, "The Decline of Mass Media," Public Opinion Quarterly 37 (summer 1973): 159-70.
63. Stephen Lacy, Arvind Diddi, and Esther Thorson, "Do Medium and Small Circulation Dailies Produce Abnormal Profits?" (paper presented at the annual meeting of AEJMC, San Antonio, TX, 2005).
64. For examples of the popular press debate see Brian Morrissey, "NYTimes.com. to Charge for Some Content," AdWeek, 17 May 2005, , accessed 26 June 2006;
65. Jack Shafer, "The Incredible Shrinking Newspaper: Newspapers Are Dying, but the News Is Thriving," Press Box, 26 June 2006, , accessed 24 June 2006;
66. Barbara Kiviat, "Paper Trade," Time.com, 26 June 2006, , accessed 26 June 2006;
67. and Thomas Lifson, "Another Nail in the Newspaper Coffin," The American Thinker, 18 August 2005, , accessed 26 June 2006.